Apps you’ve built and published will no longer auto-update

Based on your feedback, we’ve changed how we roll out upgrades to PowerApps in order to minimize the impact on apps you’ve already published.

Until recently, new releases of the PowerApps automatically applied product updates to published apps. This was so your end users could immediately benefit from improvements to controls and the platform. Unfortunately, in some cases, this caused some side effects that changed the behavior of your published apps, without providing app authors a chance to test these updates. We’ve reworked our release process so that apps will continue to run as published, no matter how often we update PowerApps. The only time published apps will get updated is when you edit them in PowerApps Studio, and then save and publish a new version to your users.

Users build apps with PowerApps as a platform. We deploy a new version of PowerApps every few weeks to provide the latest functionality and experiences. Similarly, we release PowerApps clients for creating and playing apps in Windows, Apple and Google stores every few weeks as well. Both PowerApps service (platform) and PowerApps clients have a release version associated with them, for example, the release version on May 30, 2017 was 2.0.640. We publish details about what’s new in each PowerApps release in our documentation.

What was happening before these changes?

Whenever you created or modified an app, it was done with a specific PowerApps release. Let’s say you created an app with PowerApps release 2.0.570, and published it to many users in your organization. Time passed, and PowerApps was upgraded to a newer version 2.0.642. Users in your organization started playing the app with the latest PowerApps service and clients 2.0.642. PowerApps automatically upgraded your app to work with PowerApps release 2.0.642, which at times changed the app experience. These changes were not visible in the Versions tab in app management experience.

We have stopped doing the auto-upgrade for your apps with every PowerApps release.

Here’s how upgrades will work now:

1. Say you modify and publish an app using PowerApps release 2.0.570. You’ll see that noted in the new column we created in the Versions tab called PowerApps release. This number indicates the PowerApps release with which your app was modified with.

2. PowerApps then releases a new version, 2.0.642. Even if users in your organization download the latest PowerApps client and use the 2.0.570 version your app, the app will be compatible with the newer PowerApps clients and will play normally.

3. If you (the app creator) downloaded the latest client 2.0.640, modified and published the app with it. A new version for the app gets created and will appear in Versions tab.

Our goal is to continue providing you a stable experience for your apps and app users. We will keep you informed about future updates on this topic. Please let us know if you have any questions.

FAQs:

1. Ques: What is the difference between VERSION and POWERAPPS RELEASE column?

Ans: VERSION column represents the app version. Every change which happens with your app creates a new version. Even if it’s a small change you make to your app e.g. changing the color to the text box and saving the app, will create a new version of the app. Whereas POWERAPPS RELEASE represents the version of PowerApps service with which you are building the app with. So, there can be various app VERSIONS with the same POWERAPPS RELEASE but vice-versa will not be true.

2. Ques: Why do I have no value for POWERAPPS RELEASE for some of VERSIONS of the app?

Ans: We started tracking the POWERAPPS RELEASE for apps recently. Hence, some of the app VERSIONS which were created earlier, will have this field as empty. It doesn’t mean that there is any problem with these apps, but just the POWERAPPS VERSION is not tracked for them. These apps will work just fine!